A Texan conservative Anglican -- yes, a square peg -- ponders both churchly and worldly things and enjoys his new church.

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Obamacare and the Dangerous Moralism of the Left

Ace of Spades goes yard on Obama’s decision to force the Roman Catholic Church to pay for birth control and how said decision reveals the arrogant and dangerous moralism of the Left.

And Obama is a perfect example of this moralistic Leftism:

Obama is a moralist, and an arrogant one. For all the talk of Christians being rigid moralists, the dirty little secret is that the left is far more rigidly, arrogantly moralistic, and it is cheerleaded by our cultural institutions (media, academia) rather than pushed back against, so its arrogance is encouraged.

Obama is pushing, very hard, a rigid moral system, and attempting to "shove it down the throats" of people who do not seek nor need his moral instruction.

And Obama and the Left show little hesitation in using the power of the Holy State to impose their secularist morality, freedom of religion and freedom of conscience be damned. For the Left is oh-so-right . . .

. . . that of course the coercive power of the state -- with its machinery of stripping away the property and liberty of those who run afoul of it -- should be deployed to wipe out mendicants and heretics.

One of the most cherished rights, never expressed anywhere but truly central to any truly free society, is the right to be Wrong. By which I mean, you should not just be free to do the things which the hegemonic culture deems to be "right." No one ever tries to outlaw that which they themselves believe to be right.

What they attempt to do, of course, is outlaw that which they believe to be wrong.

If you do not respect a citizen's right to be wrong -- if your first impulse is to use the frightening machinery of state coercion to compel him to be "right," as you see "right" -- then you do not respect him at all.

This is the chief character flaw of the leftist movement -- their inability to respect anyone at all but their own. [ed. – I could have a good rant on that point alone, but I will desist.] A very provincial and solipisitically childish way to view the world, of course, which leads to a vicious arrogance in attempting to pound, pound, pound square pegs into the round holes the state has cut for them.

The left would just be wrong, and not dangerous, if it weren't so arrogant about disposing of people's freedom with a single thoughtless line of legislation.

It is that, the arrogance and the profound disrespect of anyone who does not wear the feathers and warpaint of their tribe, that makes them not just wrong but sinister.

Absolutely right. And I have little more to add except that this latest putsch to bulldoze basic freedoms to impose a secularist (im)morality is part of the totalitarian impulse of Obama and the Left about which I’ve warned again and again.

This isn’t about just health insurance, taxes, and the economy, as important as those subjects are. This is about freedom and how Obama and his allies are attacking freedom.